Category Archives: The Scary Stuff

Compost vs. Arsenic: And the winner is–compost!

January 21, 2009 by The Manic Gardener

Several posts back I mentioned in passing that compost can help fix arsenic in soil, and it seems reasonable to explain what the hell I was on about there. To "fix" arsenic is get it to bond with other, stable molecules so that it can neither leach from the soil into the water supply, nor migrate into your vegetables, and thence into you.

I got onto this originally because the news articles about the great Tennessee coal ash spill of '08 kept mentioning arsenic. Arsenic, I learned, occurs in several different forms, but the one that turns up most commonly in coal ash is arsenate(V), the same form that leaches into soil from telephone poles and fences treated with copper chromate arsenate (CCA).

And yes, at least one recent study conducted at the University of Florida found that when carrots and lettuce are grown in soil that's contaminated by CCA, both vegetables absorbed less arsenic when the soil received plentiful treatments of compost. 

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Posted in Composting, Environment, Organic Gardening, Research Spin-off, Soil & Amendments

Er–coal ash as a soil amendment?

January 19, 2009 by The Manic Gardener

I always knew the Brits were crazy.

Given the justifiable panic over the Tennessee fly ash spill here in the States, it’s almost impossible to believe that people might put anything remotely resembling coal by-products in their gardens on purpose, but they do.

Sounds nuts, I know, but experiments have been ongoing in experiments have been conducted in India, Australia, China, and the United States, Poland, Thailand, and who knows, maybe the North Pole, growing vegetables (or in China, trees) in soil amended with bottom ash. Since ash is almost always quite alkaline (pH>9), this only makes sense in soils that have low pHs, but in those it can raise pH, improve water retention, improve mineralization, and increase nutrient availability. And at normal agricultural application rates (20 tons or more (!) or so on each hectare, which is about 2.5 acres) virtually all of experiments I’ve looked at show that these unlikely amendments are not accumulating at dangerous levels in plants.

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Posted in Environment, Organic Gardening, Research Spin-off, Soil & Amendments

Coal ash in the garden?

January 15, 2009 by The Manic Gardener

Coal ash has been coming at me from all directions; by an odd coincidence, a recent commenter on last summer’s wood ash in the garden posts wrote about coal ash, even as I worked on the post about the great ash spill at the Tennessee power plant.

Jacqueline had been putting her ashes from wood and solid fuel on her vegetable garden for a couple of years, though she did the responsible person’s internet search first, finding only sites touting the benefits of ashes in general. Then, just a week or two ago, a response to a letter in the Guardian cited the smokeless fuel folks as saying that these ashes should under no circumstances be put in gardens.

Gulp. So—how bad is this bad news?

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Posted in Environment, Organic Gardening, Soil & Amendments

For arsenic-free water, pull up your compost socks.

January 9, 2009 by The Manic Gardener

I realize that this post-title sounds as if I'd lost both my remaining marbles, or else as though I were trying to imitate the inimitable off-the-wall titles of the great Blogger from Blackpitts, James A-S himself. But no. As you will see.

Let us begin with the subject of spreading compost. Easy, right? All you need is a wheelbarrow and a shovel. Well. Check out the photo below.

Compost blanket ap. McCoy
Source: Compost: Completing the Cycle
Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TECQ), 20

That, folks, is how they do it in Texas. Apparently, when they go for compost there, they do it big-time. (Why am I not surprised?)

Compost blankets like this one reduce runoff, making reseeding disturbed soil far quicker, more successful, and therefore economical than it is when using what are disparagingly referred to as "traditional methods." But that's not really the point here. The point is the machinery, which I'll return to in a minute.

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Posted in Composting, Environment, Research Spin-off

The Wrinkled American: Tumble Dryer Addiction

December 16, 2008 by The Manic Gardener

So while we’re on the subject, has anyone checked out the tumble-dryer posts over at Bean Sprouts? Read through the comments on the last two, “Tumble Dryer” and “Tumble Dryer Again,” and you’ll meet scads of people who don’t own dryers. As I said in a comment, my bet is that most of them are British, not American or Canadian. Over here, if you live in a house it’s got a dryer, and if you live in an apartment, you probably wash AND dry your clothes at a laundromat.*

Sometime this summer I discovered that #1 son almost never uses a dryer. Inspired, I’ve been trying to wean myself from dependence on the thing, as it's a veritable energy-sink, and have dried more and more clothes on racks. (There are no radiators in this house, just hot air vents, so what I’m coming to see as the British Dryer Alternative (BDA) isn’t really an option.)

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Posted in Environment